Thoughts

The Pros and Cons of Creating Sprint Goals

I had never looked at it through this lens before. Goals had always been more of an afterthought.

Pros for creating sprint goals:

A dev team is united towards accomplishing one thing through many stories

Stakeholder communication – instead of trying to understand individual, unrelated stories, they only have to understand the work that’s being done to affect a single goal

In Sprint review we mainly measure the work against a single goal

Helps prioritize; on a Friday afternoon I can get the stakeholders to agree to a single goal and then figure out the work that fits into the sprint (and not have to show a full Jira backlog to get there)

Teamwork; since we’re all working to accomplish the same goal and not unrelated stories (account speed as a goal could still contain stories for emails/video loading AND a story for lists though)

Cons:

We usually have a number of small things that find their way into each sprint, unrelated to the whole (like bugs)

Hard to put a full team on one goal, perhaps the fix being to create smaller teams